Kusadasi

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Kusadasi, Turkey is where we landed on Wednesday morning. We left at 8:00 a.m. for our tour of Ephesus (Ancient City).

—– Sorry Folks, no pictures today. I left my camera on the ship, and Annette’s camera is one of the modern old-fashioned type that actually uses film —–

There was a lot of the town still visible, and it was easy to see how things were in ancient times. We saw two other cities also — Didyma and Miletus. In Didyma we saw the huge temple of Apollo. It had pillars that were nine feet in diameter — 127 of them. This temple was a “little” smaller than what the temple of Diana would have been in Ephesus. The temple of Diana is no longer able to be seen. There are just a few “footings” where it was. In Miletus, we crawled all over the theater there. It was not as large as the one in Ephesus, but it would have easily held over 10,000 people. It was quite interesting to see.

While our tour guide was very knowledgeable, he was also a little weird. This day was one of our hottest and our guide would stand in the sun and talk “forever” about mythology. The ladies had fun watching Kara pout about the heat.

We finished our tour around 4:30 p.m. I was soaking wet and wanted to go to our room to put on a dry shirt before we walked around the town. It felt really good to wash our hands and faces. Turkey is very dry and desert-like. The shopping was pretty good, but there wasn’t anything were really were looking for.

We decided to watch the boat leave the port at 10:30 p.m. Annette didn’t like that part because she found out they sail into the darkness with no lights on.

Around 11:15 p.m., we went to the Explorer’s Lounge to try the midnight snacks. They were very good — meatballs, egg rolls, quarter sandwiches, and deviled eggs.